Stairways to Heaven

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not the tallest man in the world. Safe to say a career in the NBL never beckoned. It has never really worried me and I don’t often think about except when I am getting pants altered and they have to chop off and throw out $30 worth of material that I had just paid for. But when you go to Europe you realise that if only I had been born even 150 years ago I would have been perfectly average at 165 cm or 5’6” in the old money.

In the desperate years before the Americans joined WW1 the UK army was quite happy to take soldiers at 5’2”. And go back further, say 500 years ago, and I would have been above average height. Such is the power of quality nutrition.

So something puzzles me about something I noticed with the staircases in Europe that are many hundreds of years old. Why isn’t the height of the individual steps in castles, hunting lodges, manors and churches lower to suit what would have been the shorter general population? Some are but some of the staircases are actually the opposite with quite high risers so I am wondering. I guess more steps in the staircase would cost more in material and labour but when you are doing all that construction for rich lords or even better for the Almighty in heaven I would have thought money was no object. Cost didn’t seem an issue with the magnificent tapestries and every other example of the decorative arts that I saw in said buildings in Italy, England and Scotland.

It's just that at the time, when you are seeing so much lavish silverware, antiquities, art, gold, hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of items commissioned, purloined, borrowed with no intention of returning, perhaps even rarely on occasion paid for, but after a while, despite the awe and pleasure, it becomes too much, the mind begins to wander and before you know it, you are thinking about the height of risers.